Today’s Scripture Reading (February
2, 2016): Psalm 34
Apparently,
we may have a problem. Most people seem to believe that the next President of
the United States will be Hillary Clinton. This news from a recent poll comes
in spite of the fact that a vast majority of Americans do not appear to trust
Clinton. Yet, in spite of this lack of trust, the poll reveals that she will do
the best against any of her Republican counterparts. The one that has the
greatest chance of defeating her is Donald Trump. Maybe not a surprise if you
look have been watching the polls over the past few months, but definitely a
surprise when 7 out of 10 Americans say that they have serious reservations
about a Trump presidency. The candidate that the country appears to be most
comfortable with as President is Bernie Sanders. But no polls show him of
really having a chance to win the race and, if he did win the Democratic
Nomination, the polls show him in a much tighter race against whoever it is
that is nominated on the Republican side. So in spite of a trust issue, welcome
to the age of Hillary Clinton.
I have to admit
that my first reaction to the poll numbers is utter confusion. I still hold
that Trump’s high unsuitability numbers is going to come back to haunt him as
the Republican field begins to shrink. At the convention, I can imagine that on
the third and fourth votes more and more of the delegates crossing over to go
to someone other than the Donald. On the Democratic side, I have no idea how
you nominate someone for the highest office in the land that you really don’t
trust. The obvious answer is that she will win because she has higher numbers
against the Republicans in the race for the Oval Office than her counterparts,
but that seems to be a path filled only with regret. How in the world can any
of this make sense to anyone? (Personally, I think a Sanders-Bush campaign might
be the most interesting with both offering a real choice between ideologies,
but that is just me.)
I have to admit I experience the same kind of confusion when
I read Psalm 34. Don’t get me wrong, the Psalm is a beautiful Psalm about what
happens when we depend on God. The first verses of the Psalm seem to form a
beautiful hymn, while the latter part of the Psalm presents us with a wonderful
sermon on the goodness of God. The highpoint of the Psalm might be verse 8 - Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. But the
problem comes when we try to marry the Psalm itself with the inscription which
says - “Of David. When he pretended to
be insane before Abimelek, who drove him away, and he left.” The
inscription doesn’t seem to really match the Psalm.
This verse is of specific interest. In the story of David in Gath, David
pretends to be insane in the presence of the king. The problem is that the people
of Gath are trying to decide if this is the David of pop culture – the hero of
Israel – or not. So David allows spittle to run down his beard, he marks the
doors obsessively and behaves in every way like a madman until the
king has had enough and sends him away declaring that he has enough madmen in
Gath without importing more from Israel. But in this specific occasion, David’s
face would seem to be neither radiant nor not covered with shame. David acts
the fool bringing shame on himself in order to escape the king. So the Psalm
does not seem to match with the inscription.
But the
solution for Psalm 34 is probably much like the solution to the American
Political dilemma. Those involved simply reinterpret the data until they are
comfortable. For Hillary Clinton, that just means that a vote for Hillary is a
vote for Democratic Victory. We will have to wait to see if the Republican
Party can come to the same consensus over the reign of Donald Trump. Safely
hidden in a cave in Israel, David and his men relive the events that brought
them close to death in Gath, and while their faces might not have been radiant
in the midst of the struggle, they were certainly vibrant and without shame in
their cave. They had survived – and lived to fight another day, giving all of
the credit to God.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm
56
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